


Weak Spots

by Artemis1000



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Emotional Hurt, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Robot Feels, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:53:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21618676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis1000/pseuds/Artemis1000
Summary: He could handle Cassian never being his in all the ways he wanted but he couldn’t stand watching him destroy himself a little bit more with every day.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/K-2SO
Comments: 14
Kudos: 62
Collections: 300bpm Flash Exchange November 2019





	Weak Spots

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nununununu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/gifts).



> Prompt is _I Am Not a Robot - Marina and the Diamonds_

K-2SO had always prided himself on understanding Cassian Andor better than anyone else. He prided himself on understanding a lot of things better than most organics or even droids did but understanding Cassian was on a whole different level.

Cassian was harder to understand than most organics, everyone agreed. K-2SO, being nothing like anyone else, thought that Cassian was very easy to understand if you knew to look underneath what he wanted you to see. Of course, it was easier for him since Cassian actually permitted him to look beneath.

Whatever the reason, he prided himself greatly on understanding Cassian better than most – and as such, Cassian’s current behavior was nothing short of irritating.

“You are deviating from your standard behavioral protocols,” he informed Cassian one particularly frustrating night, on which he once again announced he wanted to be alone after returning to base.

Cassian always wanted to be alone after they returned from a difficult mission but before, _alone_ had always meant being alone with K-2. Now all of a sudden alone meant _alone_. K-2 had already decided two missions ago that he didn’t care for this change.

Cassian pinched the bridge of his nose. One of his normal frowns was firmly affixed to his face. Of course, they had just come out of debriefing with General Draven, which would put even a cheerful man into a sour mood, and nobody would accuse Cassian of being a cheerful man.

“You heard me, Kay. Just…” He rubbed a hand over his face and heaved a sigh. His shoulders slumped. “Just…” He didn’t finish the sentence, just waved his hand around and walked off, looking utterly defeated.

K-2SO remained where Cassian had left him and corrected his logs: he hated this change in the meaning of _alone_.

Even outside of returning from missions, Cassian was spending more time by himself, not that this was easy to notice since he spent very little time between missions anymore. Most damning of all, Cassian didn’t fight to have K-2SO accompany him. When he was assigned solo and K-2 argued, he didn’t even back him up anymore.

“Orders are orders, I have to go alone,” he said, giving him a rueful smile as he walked up the ramp of the shuttle while K-2SO stood next to it, still fuming at being left behind.

“Not if they are stupid orders!” K-2 knew it was too late for his protests to change a thing but that had never stopped him from complaining for the principle of it. “You are going to get yourself killed without me and I won’t even be there to say _I told you so_.”

Cassian didn’t deny it, his smile just turned a little sadder. “Maybe,” he said quietly. “Stay out of trouble while I’m gone, alright?”

He hit the button to close the hatch while K-2 was still processing an appropriate response.

He _loathed_ this change in the meaning of alone.

Cassian didn’t return as scheduled.

When he did return, a week late, K-2 didn’t even have the heart to berate him. He told himself he was just biding his time since Cassian was in no state to appreciate the scolding he had earned.

He didn’t leave the medbay once while Cassian was in bacta.

“This is what happens when I let you run off alone,” he informed Cassian afterward but in response, Cassian just looked sad, not convinced.

He never wanted to make Cassian sad, he just wanted him to stop looking thinner and more worn out every time he returned. He didn’t want to be stuck waiting for Cassian to return, either, but mostly he just wanted to be done with everything he said or did making Cassian sadder.

There were many things K-2SO wanted from Cassian and with Cassian, which he knew he would never have.

Being a droid, he could look up the exact timestamp of when he had realized that the emotion he felt for Cassian was love. It was harder to tell when he had first fallen for him.

Maybe it had been in one of these long nights after a mission when they hid in an abandoned building and Cassian huddled against him to soak up his warmth, or maybe one of the long days he had spent holding vigil at his sickbed. Maybe it had been when Cassian stifled his laughter at K-2’s sarcastic quips – but never well enough to hide it from him – or one of the countless times he defied all tactically sound decision-making and risked his life to save K-2’s. Maybe it was all of the above.

K-2SO only knew when he had first realized that what he felt was love and when he understood that nothing would ever come out of it.

Cassian had no use for romantic love. It wasn’t even a question of whether he could love a droid, it was just that Cassian didn’t let himself love anyone. There was no place in his life for anything but his duty.

It hurt but he accepted that Cassian could never know of his feelings. Knowing would only add to his guilt.

He could handle Cassian never being his in all the ways he wanted but he couldn’t stand watching him destroy himself a little bit more with every day.

Droids, in general, were known to be extraordinarily patient. K-2SO, in particular, was known to be extraordinarily impatient – to be more specific, he was known for growing bored and making his own entertainment.

As far as K-2 was concerned, this was a gross misunderstanding and downright slander, for K-2 could be very patient. He just had his own opinions on what warranted being patient.

It was one of these nights of huddling in abandoned places – an old smuggler’s hidey-hole beneath the abandoned building this time, which meant they could risk both light and conversation. Normally K-2 would have used the opportunity to complain about hiding from Stormtroopers when they could be fighting the Stormtroopers instead but…

“You are cold.” He paused for effect. “And you are being stubborn.”

Cassian was huddled in the blue winter jacket he loved but he was still shivering despite his best efforts to hide it. He had also been refusing to seek K-2’s warmth. “You ought to power down. I’ll keep watch.”

K-2 sized him up, unimpressed. “No.”

This earned him a heavy sigh, which was to be expected. “Kay…” And there was the reasonably exasperated voice.

Once, K-2 had known every step of Cassian’s exasperation. There was no organic he spent more time on analyzing and cataloging than Cassian, and none more deserving of his attention. Lately, though, he couldn’t even predict half of Cassian’s reactions anymore.

Organics had many words to describe the unease K-2SO was feeling but he had no stomach to be twisted or heart to be heavy, he just triple-checked every calculation and still came away with far less confidence than he liked. Nothing Cassian said or did these days was comprehensible to him and this was another thing he decided he didn’t like.

K-2SO had been extraordinarily patient waiting for an opportunity when Cassian couldn’t just walk away from him. Now the time had come to be done being patient.

“No,” he said again. Cassian just looked at him, frowning and trying not to shiver. His every exhale left a cloud of condensation in its wake. It would be hard to look imposing like this, even if his glares had ever impressed K-2 in the first place, which they hadn’t. “I don’t know why you are acting the way you do but I don’t like it and I want it to stop.”

Cassian blinked. “What?”

K-2 paused, calculating whether he should explain or assume Cassian was faking his ignorance. Then he canceled the calculation, strategical analyses hadn’t served him well lately.

“I don’t like it,” he said. Cassian could impossibly be oblivious to something that preoccupied K-2’s processors so. Never mind probabilities, he refused to believe it. He leaned his head forward and his photoreceptors brightened with the urgency he felt. “I don’t like your new _alone_.”

Cassian’s face shifted rapidly through a number of expressions.

Being a droid, K-2 had no problem catching and cataloging each. He even looked up matches for a few of them, just to see if it would help him understand. Worry, hurt, anguish, longing, fond amusement. No, that didn’t help.

Cassian’s hands were clenched, one around the grip of his blaster and the other around the hem of his jacket. “Trust me, Kay,” he said quietly, “it’s for the better.” He didn’t hold K-2’s gaze but his jaw was clenched.

“It’s not.” He focused his sensors on Cassian, soaking up the incoming data and wrapping himself in it. Worrisome as it was, it was still a little piece of Cassian which he couldn’t be denied. But he didn’t have to like what his sensors told him. Cassian was still working himself too hard. Human bodies, or minds, weren’t made to withstand such strain. “It’s hurting you.”

Cassian just kept stubbornly looking at his hands and K-2 revved his fans in imitation of one of Cassian’s amused huffs. It wasn’t enough to make Cassian smile but it made him twitch. Good enough, K-2 still knew exactly what buttons to push.

Which still left him at a loss what to do with Cassian now that he had him cornered.

“Did you know that you are a very frustrating human?”

Cassian finally looked up. “I’m not sure. You might have mentioned it once or twice.”

K-2 thought of what he could say but for all his processing power, he still couldn’t come up with the right words so he settled for a smug, “Good.” Mostly just to buy himself time. He had never been the smooth talker, that was Cassian. He was the rude talker.

So there they sat, at opposite ends of the little hidey-hole at the bottom of a duracrete shaft, the single light lamp occasionally flickering and making shadows dance on the bare, cold grey walls.

K-2SO sat there and fumed quietly to himself as the precious opportunity he had waited for ticked away one astrosecond at a time.

Cassian still sat hunched and tense and far too far away from him, though his shivering had only grown worse. It was icy down here, even K-2’s systems worked sluggishly. Maybe he could blame that for his lack of clever ideas. He never ran out of things to say, except around Cassian. It used to be easier but lately, he could never find the right words for Cassian.

K-2 shifted noisily, standing up and sitting down again in the exact same position he had sat in before.

Cassian gave a full-body twitch.

“I wouldn’t have to annoy you if you weren’t trying to ignore me,” K-2 pointed out because he had indeed never been good at smooth-talking but he was very good at being rude. Maybe it was time to play to his strengths, he had tried everything else.

Cassian gave another twitch. He went tense and his heart rate spiked just a moment before his head jerked up. Anger gleamed in his eyes as he snapped, “Do you think this is easy for me?!” His face twisted into blatant frustration – K-2 couldn’t help but take a moment to appreciate just how flexible and expressive human faces were, and how his own processor responded to every emotion he read on this human face as long as it was Cassian’s. “I just… I.” He exhaled sharply. “I’ve been trying, Kay; I have.”

For a moment, K-2 found himself actually rendered speechless. That was more of a response than he had gotten out of Cassian for weeks but it was also more confusing than anything he had gotten out of him for months.

“You are not making sense, Cassian.”

“I’ve been trying to stay away!”

K-2 dipped his head in acknowledgment; it had to be true proof of his love that he canceled every sarcastic response he had lined up. Sometimes Cassian made it too easy. “I noticed as much.”

Hope flared in him, tentative but stubborn. So it had caused Cassian distress to stay away. It wasn’t because of something K-2 had done or because he now considered him, too, a liability; it had been Cassian being Cassian. Exactly 147 times, he started and canceled simulations to predict the reason for Cassian’s distance.

“You’re infuriating,” Cassian muttered, shooting him a dark look.

“I know. I’m very proud of it.”

They fell back into silence.

It was Cassian who moved first. He looked tired and defeated but there was the determined clench to his jaw which K-2SO knew and liked so well.

“I tried to stay away,” he sighed as he slowly stepped towards K-2SO, one small, hesitant step after the other.

If he had a heart, K-2’s would have been racing. He didn’t have one but his processor was overclocking calculating possibilities and there was still this stubborn, no longer quite so tentative hope that wouldn’t stop hogging processing power.

“I don’t like it when you stay away.”

Cassian reached him and rested his forehead against K-2’s, who dimmed his photoreceptors to make him more comfortable.

There they were, K-2SO sitting and Cassian standing before him, closer than he had been in months. Hesitantly, he placed a large hand on Cassian’s back, just resting it there, wanting to feel, wanting to reassure himself he was really here. That this wasn’t just a particularly vivid simulation.

Cassian’s hands cradled his face. His faceplates didn’t have all that many sensors but K-2 knew every part of Cassian’s body as well as his own. When he gently stroked his thumbs over his faceplates, K-2’s memory added the sensation of calloused fingers. “Kay. You aren’t half as good at hiding your feelings as you believe.”

He should have said something smart or clever or at least scathingly sarcastic. But it had been months of Cassian forcing a new meaning to the word _alone_ and K-2SO had never been good at not saying exactly what he was thinking. “Have you been punishing me for that?”

Cassian inhaled sharply. “Is this what you think of me?”

“I don’t know any longer what I think of you.”

Cassian made a soft, pained noise at the back of his throat. Then there were human lips brushing against the grille of his vocoder and human hands slipping down from his faceplates along his narrow neck strut. Cassian placed his palms over his chest section, right where he had once opened him up for the reprogramming that gave him his freedom.

For once in his existence, K-2SO couldn’t think of a single clever thing to say – he could only feel.

“I’m not good at this,” Cassian whispered. His voice was rough and shaky, choked up. “I don’t know if I…”

“Don’t push me away anymore.”

Cassian was silent for far too long moments. “I’ll try.”

K-2’s fans hummed quiet, fond agreement. Maybe it wasn’t what he wanted to hear but it was the most honest promise Cassian could have given him.

They remained there in the smuggler’s hidey-hole as the astroseconds ticked by and he still didn’t know the right words to say, yet to K-2SO these astroseconds didn’t feel like wasted time anymore. Every moment was precious with Cassian warm and vulnerable and so close.

As if on cue, there were noises above them, making them tense. Heavy footsteps, followed by voices.

They exchanged a look. Cassian tightened his grip on his blaster while K-2SO with his longer arms reached out to switch off the solitary lamp, just in case any light shone through cracks in the trapdoor.

With photoreceptors going well beyond what human eyes could see, he could make out Cassian as clearly as before.

He was tense again – not frightened but braced for action, purposeful. Beautiful.

K-2SO would have liked to say he was annoyed that their moment had been cut short, and in a way he was, yet as they braced themselves for battle there was mostly one thought occupying his processor: he was glad that Cassian was no longer insisting to face danger alone.


End file.
